Customers & Loyalty

Because orders from every channel land in one place, so do the people who placed them. Customers, reviews, coupons and gift cards are all first-class records rather than a bolt-on.

Customers

Customers lists everyone who has ordered or booked. A customer record holds contact details, marketing preferences and their history with you.

Clicking a row opens a customer detail overview — order history, reservations, total spend and recent activity — rather than dropping into an edit form. It is the screen to open when someone rings up about a previous order.

The customers list with search, contact details and order counts

Customers are created automatically as orders and bookings come in, and can also be added by hand for account customers and regulars.

Reviews

Reviews are collected from the storefront and moderated in Reviews. Publish the ones you want shown, and they appear on the public reviews page (a Joomla menu item of type Next Restaurant → Reviews).

Moderation is the whole point: reviews are unpublished until someone approves them, so the public page is never a surprise.

Coupons

Create coupons under Promotions → Coupons. A coupon carries:

Setting	Effect
Code	The code guests will enter
Discount	A fixed amount or a percentage
Validity dates	When the code works
Usage limits	Total redemptions, and per customer
Minimum spend	The order value the code requires
Status	Unpublish to withdraw a code without deleting its history

Applying coupons is not available in 6.0.0. You can create and manage codes now, but checkout has no coupon field yet and no order takes a discount from a code (Coming soon). Codes you set up in the meantime are kept.

Gift cards

Gift cards are issued by staff and looked up by guests.

Issuing. Promotions → Gift Cards → New creates a card with its own code, a value, and an optional customer and expiry date.
Balance lookup. Guests enter a code on the public balance page (a Joomla menu item of type Next Restaurant → Gift Card Balance) to see its balance, status and expiry.
Management. Promotions → Gift Cards lists issued cards with their balances and status.

Redemption is not available in 6.0.0. Cards are issued in the admin — the public page looks up a balance, it does not sell cards — and the Gift card payment provider is locked (Coming soon), because nothing yet validates a balance at the point of payment. The same applies to redeeming Loyalty points against a check. Both unlock in a future update; balances issued in the meantime are kept and will be redeemable then.

Gift cards are a payment provider in the registry, so once redemption ships it will settle the check through the same pipeline as any other payment and appear in the ledger. See Payments.

The gift cards list showing issued cards with their codes, original values, remaining balances and status

Turning it off

Customers and reviews belong to the customers module; coupons and gift cards belong to loyalty. Both can be switched off independently under Apps — a venue that doesn't run promotions can remove the whole promotions area without affecting ordering.

Practical notes

Gift-card balances are money. Once redemption ships they settle checks, so treat issuing them with the same care as a till.
Reviews stay unpublished until approved. Nothing reaches the public page by default.